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The distinguishing characteristic of my Twitter stream lately has been the arrival in New York of so many of my fellow Twitterati, especially those with podcasts to their name. Why? Because it’s just about time for PodCamp NYC, which kicks off tonight with something that sounds less like a party than like a micro pitchfest, at a place called Slate (54 West 21st Street), and then continues on into Saturday, when I’ll be on an “informal roundtable” at 9am (an inhuman hour for a Saturday-morning podcast-related event, really), talking about “social media convergence and virtual worlds” with SecondCast producer and Fo3 John Swords, Joseph Jaffe, Greg Verdino, and Adam Broitman. To better navigate the event, which is open to all and features more than 100 different talks in 12 different rooms at The New Yorker hotel (481 Eighth Avenue at 34th Street), grab a pdf or interactive calendar of the full schedule. Should be fun, as there are going to be a ton of people in town for this (500 people have already RSVP’d for the party tonight), and you can even follow along to a certain extent in Second Life.

There’s a long article on the virtual world of Second Life in this month’s issue of Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine, which features a close-up avatar shot on the cover. Why bother blogging this here? Because in-flight magazines have massive readership and reach a broad cross-section of people who may or may not be interested in technology. As far as the mainstreaming of virtual worlds goes, getting the cover of an in-flight mag is a very cool thing. And the article’s not that bad either.

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Second Life architect Lordfly Digeridoo has posted a great video of the process of designing a site plan in Second Life for a real-world site in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Because of “massive procrastination,” LF says, he had only a week to do it. His video compresses that week into less than 10 minutes of high-speed SL work, and it’s pretty compelling to watch. There’s even a great sense of suspense in wondering what the finished product will be like. An excellent look at the methods of a master builder.

Microsoft will push the development of geospatial and mapping applications with “unrestricted funding” totaling $1.1 million that has been offered to 21 winners chosen from among more than 140 university teams that responded to a recent Microsoft Research request for proposals. The awards are made for one year.

What I like about this program is that it’s focused squarely on how mapping and geospatial functions can be used to improve our physical lives. According to a press release, “The university research teams aim to study and map the physical world in real time, to push the technological boundaries of local search, and to understand the potential societal impact of these kinds of geographic technologies. New solutions ultimately resulting from the research are expected to yield rich and diverse benefits, such as helping tourists find affordable restaurants with the shortest lines, or helping scientists understand changes in the ecology of biological systems under the threat of climate change.” [Emphasis added.]

Projects already in the works include layering current environmental conditions into a mirror world like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, or allowing climatologists and other scientists to examine data over the long term to track pollution and climate changes. Other projects take in what we at 3pointD would call augmented reality, combining data from tiny real-world sensors, the Internet and “a variety of other sources” with map information and geographic imagery. There’s also a researcher who’s contemplating recreating his movements in a mirror world so that friends and family can keep up with him remotely. Now that’s my kind of mapping. (more…)

Reuters carried the news Wednesday that Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, had invited FBI agents to look around the Grid at the gambling activities going on there. And though the Lindens say they “know of no law enforcement agency that has opened an investigation into gambling in Second Life,” the company has decided to no longer accept from residents “any classified ads, place listings, or event listings that appear to relate to simulated casino activity.” Now, Giddyup Holdings, a company based in the British Virgin Islands and which runs Internet gambling site PalmVegas.com as well as a Second Life casino, has issued a press release — apparently signed off on by LL’s PR agency — stating that it will no longer allow access to its SL casino by U.S. residents, and that it is talking to Linden Lab about ways to automatically restrict access to U.S. residents and computers being accessed from within the U.S. There may not be an investigation going on, but it sounds like people are nervous. I’d say it’s even money as to whether we see a ruling from the government on gambling in Second Life, since current laws (as I recall) pretty clearly state that U.S. residents aren’t allowed access to gambling via the Internet (which of course is the network through which we access SL). There’s sure to be a hue and cry from a few cyberutopian SL residents out there, but my guess is that the issue’s already been decided.

• Virtual Fitting Rooms - Intellifit Takes The Frustration Out Of Online Shopping
  3D body scanner coming to a mall near you?
  (tags: virtual clothing body technology)

Second Life resident and Fo3 qDot Bunnyhug, one of the top teledildonics engineers in the world, has a new project: The Naughtyizing of Croquet. Yes, the humble roboticist from Arkansas Oklahoma is going to spend the month of April hooking a variety of motorized sex toys to the open-source virtual world-building platform Croquet. qDot pioneered teledildonics in Second Life about a year and a half ago, and gave a great demo at SXSW06 of a vibrator that could be remotely controlled by an Xbox controller. Now he’s got his sights set on Croquet, which should provide fertile ground for the kind of remote sexuality of which qDot is a master. Plus which, if there’s anything that’s going to focus attention on a platform that’s not getting enough, it’s sex. What I loved about qDot’s rap at SXSW was that he sees teledildonics not so much as a tool for cheap Internet hookups as a way to bring couples who are separated for whatever reason closer together. For qDot, it’s more about the love than about the sex. Stay tuned at Slashdong, his blog, for continuing reports.

Shattered after SXSW? Wiped out after Virtual Worlds’07? Can’t wait for SLCC’07, but still in need of a Virtual Worlds fix? Fear not! Help is at hand in the form of the International Technology Expo, ITE’07. This time you won’t need to leave home, as the event will be held inworld from April 20th-22nd, with a grand opening on Friday, April 20th at Noon SLT/20:00 GMT. (more…)

As 3pointD continues on our path to world domination, we’re proud to introduce to readers a new contributor: Second Life resident Aleister Kronos, who’s been quietly blogging over at Ambling in Second Life for some time now, and doing a great job there of turning up unexplored corporate islands and other newsy tidbits from the virtual world of Second Life. A Second Life resident since early 2006, Al role-plays a technical architect for a European IT consulting company in real life, which apparently gives him lots of time to amble around SL. That’s good for 3pointD, and we’re very much looking forward to having his reports on the blog. Stay tuned for his first one shortly. W00t!

John Swords and I recorded a couple of new Metaverse Sessions while we were down at South by Southwest, one with Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices Online and one with Jamais Cascio of World Changing. Johnny has just posted Ethan’s session (incorrectly labeled #9, even though it’s #10), and there’s some really interesting stuff there. Ethan talks about how Google Maps was used to heighten political awareness in Bahrain, how LiveJournal has become the blogging tool of choice for politically active adults (not kids) in Russia, and the “cyber-utopian dominant narrative” in which everyone gets along in the same online place. We also explore some interesting question of how cultural backgrounds inform the use of technologies, questions that don’t get much discussed (or thought about) in most our metaversal questions. A really cool guest to have for the Sessions, and highly recommended listening.

MySpace recently announced it would hold a mock presidential election on January 1st and 2nd of next year. (Results will be posted on MySpace’s impact channel.) While that’s obviously not very virtual-worldy, I do think it’s worth noting here, because it’s going to focus a huge amount of attention on one of the most compelling sites of digital identity-making on the Web today. Not that MySpace lacks for attention, but most of that attention perceives it as a novelty. It’s only in the last couple of months that sites like MySpace and other lifelogging-related spaces are starting to be taken more seriously, as important bellwethers of the culture. I’m looking forward to seeing what the coverage of this is like in the press. I’d also love to see “global” polls held in the virtual world of Second Life. Anyone want to set that up?

• Labs/The Coop - MozillaWiki
  more stuffing for your sidebar. (via mashable)
  (tags: community design IM news open research social software web2.0)

Tune in tonight to SecondCast, the podcast Prokofy loves to hate, if you want to give us a piece of your mind: we’ll be recording live on TalkShoe.com, which I guess lets you do stuff like that. If you’re logged into TalkShoe, you oughta be able to click this link to hear us stumble over our tongues from around 10:15pm Eastern time (7:15pm SL time), and Johnny’s going to open up the lines and take questions and comments about halfway through the show. Possible topics of conversation include the recently wrapped Virtual Worlds 2007, the SL framework for Drupal that’s said to be in the works, the Second Life Community Convention, and BanLink, which Prok thinks is going to be brought into the Second Life client at some point soon, and which is sure to inspire a deep philosophical discussion of SL’s evolution from tiny little podunk cow town to the huge metaversal metropolis it is today. Give us a shout.

I had the chance to spend some time at Virtual Worlds 2007 with Nicky Morris from 3B, an interesting virtual world service I’ve blogged about before, and Nicky described to me some of the features of the 3B relaunch that’s planned for somewhere around May. According to Nicky, 3B is moving toward deeper Web integration and a more YouTube-like feel in some aspects. If you’re not familiar with 3B, it’s a service that basically grabs the content on your MySpace or other Web page, and uses it to automatically create a 3D space you can navigate as an avatar and invite your friends to. The space that gets created is more or less a room in which the various walls are textured with the images and videos from your site. I like the idea of making it easy to get content into a 3D space where you can hang out with friends, much as Kaneva does, although it remains to be seen which of the many similar services that are now popping up wins this. 3B is hoping to advance its cause with a raft of new features and ease-of-use enhancements. (more…)

Pete Cashmore’s excellent Mashable has featured a couple of interesting sites in the last few days that are moving closer to the kind of identity-building tools I’ve been thinking about lately, including the identity-information aggregator I Twitter-predicted for epredator: OtherEgo and YouGetIt let you aggregate your social networking-style identities on a single page. MobileOX is looking to do the same thing. While this isn’t a revolutionary idea (all three services sound like a home-page builder with easy plugin tools), it’s significant that the process of collecting your disparate content and identity information in one place is becoming easier. A technology that’s been around for a while only begins to have a broad impact once it becomes broadly adopted, obviously, and these are just the kind of tools that could lead in that direction. (more…)

• YouTube - Half Life 2: Disney World’s Tower of Terror
  Garry’s Mod, of course.
  (tags: disney games video youtube)

No April Fool’s joke this: 3pointD turned one year old today! It was in the early hours (early minutes, actually) of April 1, 2006, that I posted my first Hello, World! here. Something like 1,400 posts later (can that be? WordPress must be over-counting) and our mission remains the same: “At its most fundamental level, it’s about connecting people in new ways, and about giving them the tools to get more out of not just the Web but out of the real world around them.”

That’s still true, but in the year since then, the 3pointD space (aka the metaverse) has begun to resolve itself a bit — which is perhaps not surprising, since the word didn’t actually mean anything a year ago. What I’ve been trying to describe over the last year is the general direction of the future of connectivity. I still feel, as I wrote last March on my old blog, Walkerings, that “Web 2.0 is over like a hipster neighborhood when The Gap moves in,” and that there’s a new neighborhood to be colonized. That’s of course an overstatement for effect, but I don’t think it’s off the mark. Over the next several (many?) years, the most exciting developments in technology are going to be those that leverage our ever-increasing digital access to places both real and virtual to develop better connections between people in various ways.

The question is, What’s that going to look like? I hate making predictions, but as my birthday present to the blog and its readers, I’ve just spent the evening going out on a limb. You can read the details below or you can jump directly to a brief, fun scenario at the end of the post. Enjoy. (more…)

The Second Life Drupal Group has an interesting piece of news: a Drupal framework is apparently in development that would allow Drupal modules to interact with objects in the virtual world of Second Life. There’s no code on the project page at the moment, but it’s coming “Real Soon Now,” according to a comment made today by the developer (assuming it’s not an April Fool’s joke, which I don’t believe it to be). 2bits, a Drupal consulting and development company, initially announced the “release” of the framework about a month ago, but that announcement seems to have been premature. If it is, in fact, in development, it will be interesting to see what users make of it, and it could be a nice marriage of Drupal’s open-source content management system with Second Life’s semi-open-source platform. Another small step toward integrating virtual worlds with the wider Web?